Trump’s detractors are convinced he’s a buffoon. So why does he keep winning?

Lawrence Solomon:

President Trump’s detractors consider him a buffoon who can’t get anything done. They do so at their peril. In just five months in office, Trump has racked up a jaw-dropping string of accomplishments. This “buffoon” is buffaloing his critics, most of whom are too blind to see how effectively he’s implementing his agenda.

Trump is delivering in spades on one of his most publicized campaign promises — keeping illegal immigrants out of the United States and deporting the worst of those who made it into the country. Even without building his wall, illegal immigration is down 67 per cent over last year’s levels, mostly on the strength of Trump’s tough talk and tough action.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been arresting illegals at the rate of about 14,000 per month, a 38 per cent increase over the same period last year. Gang members — such as the 10,000-strong El Salvador-based MS-13 that thrived during the Obama years — are in particular being targeted. ICE’s anti-gang Surge force, in one recent six-week operation alone, captured 1,378 illegals, including 1,095 associated with gangs. Little wonder that would-be illegals, knowing they’re likely to be caught and deported, are reluctant to give the human smugglers the US$8,000 or more needed to smuggle them across the border. That price tag — up from US$5,000 under Obama, when smugglers faced fewer risks — is itself is a metric of Trump’s effectiveness in combatting illegal immigration. With last week’s announcement that immigrants won’t be eligible for welfare for five years, the U.S. becomes less appealing still to those who would come for the benefits more than for the freedoms.

Trump is also delivering on another signature issue — jobs and the economy, areas that suffered in the Obama years. Some 600,000 new jobs have been created since Trump took office, while unemployment has dropped to 4.3 per cent, the lowest level since 2001. With the war on coal over, coal mining is coming back — a new mine in Pennsylvania actually opened earlier this month — as is mining in general, where some 33,000 new jobs have been created. The Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines are no longer stymied. Business is buoyed by the prospect of lower taxes and less regulation, leading to business confidence and to a stock market that’s at record highs. As a Wall Street Journal editorial put it, “So far the Trump Administration is a welcome improvement, rolling back more regulations than any President in history.”

By any measure, Trump has been an activist president who has chalked up win after win. Those regulation roll-backs were accomplished in his first 100 days by signing 13 Congressional Review Acts, more than any other president in history. In that period, he also signed 30 executive orders, more than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and enacted 28 laws, more than any other president since Harry Truman. He has yet to repeal and replace Obamacare and he may not — many consider that unlikely. Still, it took Obama longer to pass Obamacare and no one should count Trump out — he is nothing if not persistent.

In foreign affairs, where Trump isn’t hobbled by an obstructionist Congress, he is if anything even more activist: He rolled back Obama’s concessions to Cuba, dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan, bombed Syria in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, united the Sunni Arab world against Iran, isolated Qatar for its funding of terrorism, revived peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, convinced NATO members to honour their funding commitments, is renegotiating NAFTA and withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord. Trump is on the verge of defeating ISIL in Iraq and is in hot pursuit of it elsewhere. No one refers to the United States as a paper tiger any more.

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